As there's been a lot more discussions and possibly some controversy going around over curation reports we at @ocd generally support I wanted to give a brief explanation of how they work in our incubation and in general for curator's and the diverse initiatives we support within our project. If anything maybe this will encourage other big curation projects/accounts to support something similar and hear us out as to why we like the curation reports to work a certain way and everything that entails to maybe have it become a standard in the future.
Originally curators in our project have been doing curation reports for a long time, now with linear curation rewards this might be something that's even more important than before to keep doing and incentivizing curators for their work to go out of their way to look for overlooked/underrewarded content for retention, activity and a thriving ecosystem which I'm sure at the early stages no other platform can compete against in term of newcomers being able to instantly start earning for their activity and effort.
One of the base ideas behind rewarding curation from @ocd has been around 10% rewards compared to the curation that lands on the content they're curating and nominating for votes. Meaning if there were 10 posts curators in our team went out and looked for, checked for plagiarism, checked for general activity/effort of the account, past curation, etc, we'd reward them with 10% vote compared to what the original curated post would receive. If this was the only curation report/initiative that day you can see it as 90% of that days voting power would go towards the 10 curated posts while 10% of that days voting power would go to the curation report of those 10 posts. This brings equality and a reward for curators, meaning that even if they themselves have no stake but have put in effort and time to look for these posts they'd receive a reward for it. This is something not many agreed on but there being a wide range of curators with close to 0 stake and 100k hp stake it would give them a fair reward for their time and effort allowing anyone to become a curator. The word curator is of course quite wide in and of itself lately but to us it means someone who has learned the skill of also checking for abuse in the form of plagiarism, fake ID's and other shady activities. Not something that always gets caught but there are other tools that have been around to help with it and still are - cheetah, hivewatchers and in general other curators or stakeholders of all types that would speak up or report if they noticed something.
Over time we've implemented a ton of other initiatives but the base 10% has remained pretty much the same throughout, there are some activities that take more effort or time (such as @lovesniper) where it can go a bit higher than 10% or the posts are voted a bit less than general curated posts to not incentivize fake accounts and one time intro post abuse but those are very few outliers.
With the community incubation we wanted to do something similar, a big reason to this was due to the community structure not being fully developed to allow communities in a trustless way to receive a portion of the post rewards that go through them (although I believe @peakd is trying something for that nowadays - haven't looked deeper into it yet only heard about it). Community leaders would naturally also put a lot of time into their communities, not only would they learn a bit on how to prevent and notice abuse but also make use of muting, giving authors roles, engaging and curating posts posted daily in their communities and nominating them through us for bigger votes. The curation reports in communities were a way for us to mimic some of the previous well working incentives to have the leaders and people taking part in the communities be rewarded for their time and effort, the general thought behind it was that the leader would decide how the post rewards were shared depending on who put in what amount of time/effort leading up to that report post.
Here's an example of the perfect use of these curation reports.
Community leader of Hive Pets has 2 other curators in his team and 1 moderator taking care of roles, muting off-topic posts, etc.
Monday is over, community leader nominated 6 posts for curation, while curator #1 nominated 2 posts later that day and curator #2 nominated 2 more posts later that day for curation. Moderator had nothing to do that day but looked over posts to see if any muting was needed or if a verified author needed a member role or something.
Now here are some acceptable curation report rewarding scenarios:
Curation report for Monday comes out; highlighting the 10 posts they curated that day with beneficiaries going 60% to community leader for his 6 nominations, 20% to curator #1 and 20% to curator #2.
or
Curation report; 10 posts, leader takes 50%, curator #1 takes 20%, curator #2 takes 20% and moderator gets 10% for his time overlooking things even though he didn't need to take any action that day.
or
Curation report; 10 posts, leader takes 40%, curator #1 takes 15%, curator #2 takes 15%, moderator takes 5% and 25% go to the authors they nominated that day for some extra rewards.
The main point was that leaders can do however they want as long as the rewards are in a transparent way going to those who put in time and effort that day. Since this was something we have been doing in a long time and offered this to community leaders who got their community incubated to begin with we wanted to have a say in how fair it was being used. Not to mention we would also spend part of our voting power rewarding these reports to make sure communities had the necessary manpower and incentives to thrive, be active and grow.
There was also a completely new alternative we offered, where community leaders could send part of the post rewards as beneficiary to @reward.app (a service that liquidates rewards) so they could use those rewards to tip posts that weren't good enough to receive bigger votes through us or just to reward comments if the leaders and curators didn't have enough voting power (especially pre linear curve) to reward active engagement and comments with some tips. The reason we preferred the use of @reward.app was so that we would instantly know that this curation report from this community is planning on using those rewards for exactly this. Because with 30+ communities it would be impossible to know without them sending beneficiary to @reward.app if they also were part of the community that were planning on tipping with x% that was going to the community account but just didn't want to use reward.app. It would be too difficult to keep track who was doing what and at the same time open it up for possible abuse/greed/ulterior motives which I'll explain in the next part.
Now here are some examples we didn't want to see because it leaves a lot of leeway for abuse.
Same example as above:
Curation report, 10 posts, leader takes 0%, curator #1 takes 10%, curator #2 takes 10%, moderator takes 5% and 75% go to "the community account for growth".
Now right off the bat this is something that makes my eye twitch. I understand that the majority of people here have the right intentions but doing it this way will lead to abuse eventually. I've been around for 5 years and have seen it happen time after time again. People would promise something and some time passes they just go AWOL and some more time passes and you see the account starting a powerdown and funds being sent to exchanges.
Here's another unwelcomed example:
Curation report, 10 posts, leader takes 30%, curator #1 takes 10%, curator #2 takes 10%, moderator takes 5% and 45% "stay with the account".
Now here I either ask if they're planning to use those 45% to tip to people in the community, give out as prizes for contests or what is going to happen and if they could possibly use reward.app just for transparency so that later we can check and be like "oh nice the 45% they liquidated were all sent out as prizes for this contest they ran" or "the 45% were all given out as tips to users in their community".
Again, we have nothing against community leaders getting a bit more rewards, they can just give themselves a higher % even if they didn't do much work that day, if it becomes too much it's transparently being shown and maybe some of their curators will then speak up if they feel it is unfair. Hiding behind "growing community account" is the one shady thing they would then instead use to counter that argument. Similar to how crypto.piotr were forcing their community authors to give them 50% of the rewards so they could "grow the community account for bigger votes" during HBD being off peg to the upper levels. Yes, that's an exaggerated comparison on the abuse but it still stands.
We even offered community leaders a small delegation that they'd keep for themselves, if they put in the time they would fairly be rewarded by giving themselves beneficiaries too. If they wanted those rewards to stay with the account they could just delegate to the community account when the rewards came in but it would keep everything transparent and remove any leeway to abuse it sooner or later. We even encouraged other stakeholders to delegate to these accounts in our weekly highlighting of all the communities in our incubation, their growth in subscribers and which accounts they could directly delegate to to help them grow. I know some users like @solominer who were delegating to them and used these reports to know where to delegate.
Instead what happened was that I was met with defensive arguments, telling me not to force them how to run their communities, when all I asked was to be transparent with the post rewards of the reports they would link to us for rewards and in the end they just left went they couldn't get their way.
Why was I being so insisting on this? Well, here's some examples of how this could be abused and stifle growth.
Leader continues to take most of the rewards for himself - to the "community account" that belongs to him and only give the people actually putting in time and effort a small fraction of the rewards.
Leader ignores inviting more curators/moderators because he wants the curation report rewards all for himself - the community keeps growing, leader has a hard time to check on all posts, moderate, engage and make sure everyone gets attention. This stifles the growth of the community, instead of inviting more people to share the workload he's only doing the incubation thing for the extra rewards or to be able to dictate who the rewards go to (trust me there have been so many leaders who either only kept nominating their close friends, other curators in the community or possible sockpuppet accounts).
Last but not least it doesn't scale. Growing communities need more workers, especially if you're someone who's also holding down a real job and doing this on the side, you're not going to be able to tend to your community duties as well as you'd want. Hell there's subreddits who go out and look for moderators just to help them take care of their subreddits they tend to for free and no one receives any rewards from anywhere but they still love the niche and want to see it grow.
At the end of the day it was just quite frustrating seeing some of the community leaders leave over this, saying I was trying to control their community or whatever they thought and instead just doing their authors in their community a disservice cause they possibly would miss out on rewards if their content was amazing. It's not a big loss for me personally and a lot of curators in our team would still try find the time to look into their communities to curate them for the #other-niche-communities initiative where we'd try and curate exceptional content from communities not in our incubation.
Anyway, if you've read this far down, what I'd like to see more of is transparency and that's something that can easily be created by using the beneficiary option well. Like I said to another project recently, it's not enough that the people in your team are okay with the way you share rewards with them, the rest of the platform needs to know how it works and be okay with it too as the Hive post reward pool belongs to everyone of us and it's our duty to make sure it's being used as fair as possible.
A comparison that came to mind when discussing this was that if I decided suddenly that I would start taking a % of the post rewards from the @ocd curation initiatives just because I've created it and invested a lot of time in getting them where they are today. Sure some of the curators would be okay with me taking 30-50% of the post rewards, although they most likely wouldn't think it was okay - obviously especially not now since it wasn't that way to begin with. I'm sure though that other curators and people seeing them would wonder what I (or @ocd) is doing in all those initiatives to get part of the post rewards, especially if a big percentage of the rewards are from autovotes that would land on them anyway.
I'm sure that if I told people "it's to grow the account" they'd think I'm kidding or start downvoting them. Even if I'm not taking a % at all and it's all going to curators, etc, if they would start receiving a lot of rewards daily I'm sure people would start downvoting them eventually because it would quite frankly be too much rewards allocated to them, whether it's just reports or reports with some original text attached to them it wouldn't matter much.
So yes, this platform is built on transparency. With that I of course mean the wallets being out in the open and where rewards are going as well. Naturally it still gives us the freedom to be anonymous but how much we earn and what we do with them is quite transparent so try and use that transparency in beneficiary settings as well to not give people a reason to think you're trying to cheat your way to more rewards than you should earn so that eventually you just quit and run to the bank with whatever amount you've managed to weasel your way by promising it would be used "for the community" cause that's just shit Ned would do. Don't be @ned.
